'Breaking Bad,' the final season: Reconstruction of the fable

In the season opener, Walt buys a machine gun. He assures the nervous dealer that the weapon will never leave New Mexico.

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I’m beginning to feel the same way about the cash he used to purchase it. What if "Breaking Bad" is actually a magical fable about a man who makes a wish for a bag of money? The wish comes true, except the money is cursed. As long as the money remains in the man’s home town, it can’t be spent on anything anyone actually wants. But whenever anyone tries to take the money elsewhere—to a place where it can be put to use—that person dies.

Jesse wants to go to Alaska now, but when Jane was still alive the plan was New Zealand. She’d paint pictures of the cliffs and sea and he’d become a bush pilot. With their duffel bags of cash from his and Walt’s first big cook with Gus, the world was theirs. That night, though, Jane chokes to death in her sleep. Jesse is sent away to a posh rehab while his money remains in Albuquerque under Walt’s care. Next Mike tried to take his tote full of dough across state lines. Instead he wound up decomposing in a barrel of acid. Huell and Kuby joked this week about making off to Mexico with Walt’s money. I would’ve liked to have seen them try.

And all the while, the useless, unspendable money keeps multiplying. The numbers on Walt Jr.’s cancer fighting charity website grow bigger. The stacks in the storage space grow higher. At this point, they can barely give the stuff away. When Walt tries to pay for a birthday breakfast, the waitress insists it’s free. Jesse tosses wads of it from his car and a good Samaritan reports it to the cops. Skyler hands a customer a five instead of a one and he demands the right change. It’s the worst con ever, a perfect representation of how ultimately bad these guys have turned out at being crooks. They can’t even scam a man into taking more than he’s owed.

Jesse did so many terrible things in order to be able to pay someone to help him forget what he’d done. As soon as Saul went looking for a “money-sized bag,” I knew Jesse wouldn’t be going anywhere. I actually realized how the whole thing was going to play out too. I saw Huell take the pot from Jesse’s pocket and I knew that that would lead to Jesse figuring out about Walt poisoning Brock. For the second time, Jesse made the mistake of doing drugs before embarking on a new life, and once again it cost him.

I wish for Jesse’s sake that after he had put all the pieces together in his head, he had still gotten in that van. Like his mentor, he’s impulsive. Walt’s mind is at its sharpest when he’s under the gun, like when he was literally under Mike’s gun and still managed to call Jesse and tell him to kill Gale. In these moments he’s able to link the chain effects very quickly, playing a game of speed chess. But Jesse’s impetuous acts come from a place of real pain and guilt, not arrogance, and as a result they rarely turn out well for him. Not that Jesse seems all that interested in self-preservation these days. Which means I’m going to have to be sad enough about his impending death for the both of us.

Look, there are five episodes left. "Breaking Bad" is the most conservative crime show I’ve ever seen when it comes to killing off its characters, but now that we’re at the half-way point, it seems like the bodies are going to have to start to fall. The writers have so far been presenting things to us in an order we weren’t expecting; Jesse dying before or instead of, say, Hank, would be in keeping with that. Those rows of monuments that Jesse was standing in front of on the street sure looked an awful lot like tombstones.

Part of the reason Walt has survived for as long as he has is by steadfastly refusing to take anyone else seriously. He’s turned underestimating his opponents into a superpower. A lot of people had a problem with Walt leaving his copy of Leaves of Grass out, but I saw it as just another example of his viewing Hank as more of an irritant than an actual threat. In some ways, Hank working for the D.E.A. was even an advantage, since Walt could then stay apprised of what the authorities knew. That’s what was registering on Hank’s face while he watched Walt’s “confession,” a sudden realization of his place. For the past year, Heisenberg has been his greatest obsession, consuming his every thought. For Walt, though, Hank was a minor character.

Walt never gave Mike any credit either, although in that case he was wrong. Mike was savvier than Hank and deserved Walt’s respect. Didn’t matter, though. Walt still condescended his way to victory. Mike’s careful instincts were just absorbed by Walt’s insanity, like a horse in quicksand.

Walt’s been treating Jesse like a loser ever since he was his legit high-school teacher. He doles out or withholds his praise depending on which suits his purpose, a strategy that’s been working swimmingly for him so far. Jesse’s psyche has become as unstable as a dandelion. When Jesse quit after the boy Drew’s death, Walt tried to get him to stay by telling him that cooking meth was his best and only option: “What have you got in your life? Nothing. Nobody. Video games and go-carts. And when you get tired of that, what then? How soon will you start using again?”

In this episode, now that he wants Jesse to go, suddenly Jesse’s future is bright: “You could get a job, something legitimate, something you like. Meet a girl. Start a family. You’re still so damn young.” Jesse’s lack of people who care about him has become a plus, something to envy: “If I could trade places with you, I would.”

Both Jesse and Skyler spend a lot of time staring into space in this episode. At the Mexican restaurant, Skyler doesn’t know where else to look. In every direction is a person whose eyes she’s afraid to meet with her own. So, like Lydia last week, who literally covered her ears and closed her eyes in order not to confront the multiple murders she'd engineered, Skyler copes by shutting everything out.

Jesse’s different, though. His eyes are wide open to what he’s done. In the desert, Jesse silently watches a tarantula making its way cross the sand, seemingly reminding him of the murdered boy. We weren’t shown the whole arc of that first arachnid’s fate but it seems likely it was let loose (unless Todd politely stomped it to death just for kicks). In order to grant one living creature its freedom, another one had to die.

When Walt shows up in the desert, his first question about Hank isn’t "What did you tell him?" but “What does he know?” There is neither doubt nor gratitude in Walt’s voice about Jesse’s continued loyalty. To him, that’s just the natural order of things. Their hierarchy has been so set in stone that even at the end of the episode, when a raging Jesse is in Saul’s office after finding out about the pickpocketing, he still refers to Walt as “Mr. White.”

In the desert, Jesse calmly answers Walt’s questions. He was listening more keenly in that interrogation room then it appeared. Hank’s father-figure act never had a chance. Jesse is finally aware of when he’s being worked over for someone else’s gain. Everyone who had had ever really had his best interests in mind—Mike, Andrea, Jane (although she was complicated)—is now gone, all because of Walt.

I don’t even think Walt is aware he is acting during the speech he gives to Jesse. He switches personas so fluidly now that it takes over his conscious mind. Each performance is its own fugue state. When he arrives at the desert, he is in Heisenberg mode, but when he leans against the car, he’s transformed into Mr. White, weaver of tales. He’s forgotten the fight they had after Drew, and all the things he said. Now that it helps him out, in this moment, he sincerely wants to help Jesse out too. There are always seeds of truth in Walt’s lies. That’s why he’s able to be so convincing.

It’s the difference between his kind of sociopath and Todd’s. When Todd says that the train heist was perfect, he means it. He’s not omitting the part where he murdered Drew. That detail was never important enough to him to have registered in the first place.

In Walt’s video confession, you can tell which emotions are true by the changes in his voice. It grows hard when talking about Hank taking his children from him for three months. It cracks when he talks about Skyler being horrified by what he’d done.

With Jesse, when Walt folds his arms around him, I believed in the truth of that hug. I didn’t think it was a strategy. Jesse is the only person who knows the specifics of what they’ve done. Instead of putting a target on Jesse’s back, that's actually the reason I think Walt is so intent on keeping him alive. He needs a witness, someone who can both testify to his bravery and commiserate with his trauma. That hug was the embrace of men who’ve been through a war together.